| I've now worked in IoT for decades and have some thoughts about the transformation of the market. Specifically or what advances in hardware and connectivity have enabled. People are always saying that "hardware is hard" and that often stops start-ups from venturing into the IoT market. It has also, IMHO, slowed the overall growth in IoT. I believe that IoT is going to be a critical part of the future as it will be how AI will "feel and interact" with the physical world. :-) The transformation that I mentioned above is where there are ways that a start-up might not ever have to deal with the hardware, unless they truly believe that the hardware is their core IP or competitive differentiator. I work with IoT companies on a daily basis, and we often find that start-ups will "reinvent the wheel" because they believe they have to build the hardware themselves when many COTS solutiuons exist. Instead of focusing on their SaaS platform, they blow unnecessary funds on hardware development. Again, I'm not saying ALL IoT start-ups fit this mold, but we find a vast majority that do. What if there was a company that could collaborate with these start-ups and source hardware that could collect the data required, provide the connectivity for the environment, provide management tools for this infrastructure, and data management services that would deliver the required data to your SaaS application as desired? I think of this as a IoT Infrastructure provider. The start-up - or even enterprise - could focus on their real IP and the IoT Infrastructure provider would focus on data collection, ETL-like services, and data delivery to the cloud application. In addition the IoT Infrastructure provider would constantly be looking at ways to reduce costs and cost optimize that data delivery for their customer. Thoughts? Feedback? |